Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World

by Annie Lowrey Narrated by Annie Lowrey

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Shortlisted for the 2018 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

A brilliantly reported, global look at universal basic income-a stipend given to every citizen-and why it might be necessary in an age of rising inequality, persistent poverty, and dazzling technology.

Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your bank account, with nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy. But it has become one of the most influential and hotly debated policy ideas of our time. Futurists, radicals, libertarians, socialists, union representatives, feminists, conservatives, Bernie supporters, development economists, child-care workers, welfare recipients, and politicians from India to Finland to Canada to Mexico-all are talking about UBI.
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In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey examines the UBI movement from many angles. She travels to Kenya to see how a UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor, South Korea to interrogate UBI's intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in expectation of a world with advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labor.
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Lowrey explores the potential of such a sweeping policy and the challenges the movement faces, among them contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and, most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing. In the end, she shows how this arcane policy has the potential to solve some of our most intractable economic problems, while offering a new vision of citizenship and a firmer foundation for our society in this age of turbulence and marvels.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/16/2018
What would happen if everyone received $1,000 from the government each month, no strings attached? Lowrey, a contributing editor for Atlantic magazine, examines the promises and pitfalls of a universal basic income, or UBI, in this complex analysis. Considering examples such as Iran, which replaced subsidies for certain goods with a UBI in 2010, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose tribal members receive profit payouts on tribally owned casinos, Lowrey debunks the main critique leveled against UBI: that it would disincentivize work. Drawing on interviews with tech tycoons, development economists, and a diverse sample of the world’s poor, she persuasively argues that UBI would actually stimulate higher levels of investment in small businesses, increase workers’ bargaining power, and serve as a buffer against the technological advances that are likely to replace workers with robots. Lowrey is at her best discussing the potential role UBI could play in achieving development outcomes in places like Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states and a prime example of the inefficiency of traditional state-funded poverty alleviation programs. This book is a lively introduction to a seemingly quixotic concept that has attracted thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Martin Luther King Jr., and that continues to provoke. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Co. (July)

From the Publisher

Lowrey, a journalist who covers economic policy for The Atlantic, musters considerable research to make the case for a universal basic income— a government-funded cash handout for all.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Lowrey is a policy person. She is interested in working from the concept down.... Her conscientiously reported book assesses the widespread effects that money and a bit of hope could buy.”
—The New Yorker

“Like UBI, the book is ambitious, and it presents a strong case for cash aid.”
—Financial Times

“Annie Lowery has given basic income a wonderful upgrade…[bringing] first-hand accounts of struggling workers all over the world…. A must-read as basic income becomes a more mainstream idea.”
—Forbes

“A lively introduction to a seemingly quixotic concept that has attracted thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Martin Luther King Jr., and that continues to provoke.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Wide-ranging, grounded in examples of UBI in action, “Give People Money” is also notably clear-eyed.”
—Datebook

“Send everyone a monthly check? Eliminate all welfare bureaucracies? Even if you don’t believe that technology reduces the total number of jobs, the idea of a universal basic income is worth analyzing. In this provocative book, Annie Lowrey explores the history, practicality, and philosophical basis of an idea now drawing attention from all points on the political spectrum.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs
 
“Like it or hate it, the UBI is the biggest social policy idea of the 21st century so far. Annie Lowrey’s book is the best study yet of the world’s experiences with UBI. It deserves acclaim and, more important, the close attention of policy makers.”
—Lawrence H. Summers, former Treasury Secretary of the United States
 
“Give People Money is extraordinary, and the world has never needed it more. Annie Lowrey has a talent for making radical ideas feel not just possible—but necessary. This is a book that could change everything.”
—Jessica Valenti, author of Sex Objects: A Memoir
 
“Give People Money is about Universal Basic Income in the way that Moby Dick is about a whale. If you want to learn about UBI, read this book. If you don’t care about UBI, but you’re interested in how technology is changing our economy, how the character of work is transforming, what poverty looks like in the US and globally, and how governments might more ably aid their citizens, then you really must read this book.”
—Shamus Khan, Columbia University, author of Privilege
 
“A fantastic introduction to UBI that's both thorough and accessible.”
—Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures

“A useful primer on a highly contentious topic.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Lowrey… maintains that just like on The Jetsons and Star Trek, we now have the technology to manipulate and redistribute money. Perhaps it’s time to consider a move toward a cashless, and hopefully more equitable, global society.”
—Booklist

Kirkus Reviews

2018-04-16
A journalist who focuses on economic policy explores the idea of reducing poverty through recurring government payments to every adult citizen.The concept of a "universal basic income" seems straightforward. As Atlantic contributing editor Lowrey writes, "it is universal, in the sense that every resident of a given community or country receives it. It is basic, in that it is just enough to live on and not more. And it is income." The author explores UBI proposals from three angles: how the money could affect the desire for employment, the effectiveness of the payments in helping to ameliorate poverty, and how well the payments would bring about social inclusion within given community. Much of Lowrey's exploration is theoretical since UBI experiments are few and far between. Her research took her to often isolated, impoverished areas of Kenya, India, and the United States. In the U.S., the author writes about how many of the impoverished citizens she met had previously functioned well economically, partly because workers could join labor unions that advocated successfully for decent wages, on-the-job safety regulations, affordable health care, payment of school tuitions, sick leaves, maternity and paternity leaves, and the like. As employers dismantled unions—often abetted by Republican presidents and members of Congress—without punishment, an increasing number of laborers became unemployed or underemployed. Some ended up bankrupt and/or homeless. Outside of the U.S., Lowrey's findings are murkier. The laws and customs of different nations vary widely, and the concept of "poverty" means something different—and is far more consequential—to families that cannot afford to put food on the table or find suitable housing. Pilot programs in portions of Mexico and Brazil had led to further experiments in other nations, but interpreting the minimal data from the experiments feels premature. For now, though, Lowrey offers a good starting point.A useful primer on a highly contentious topic.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169441659
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Ghost Trucks

The North American International Auto Show is a gleaming, roaring affair. Once a year, in bleakest January, carmakers head to the Motor City to show off their newest models, technologies, and concept vehicles to industry figures, the press, and the public. Each automaker takes its corner of the dark, carpeted cavern of the Cobo Center and turns it into something resembling a game-show set: spotlights, catwalks, light displays, scantily clad women, and vehicle after vehicle, many rotating on giant lazy Susans. I spent hours at a recent show, ducking in and out of new models and talking with auto executives and sales representatives. I sat in an SUV as sleek as a shark, the buttons and gears and dials on its dashboard replaced with a virtual cockpit straight out of science fiction. A race car so aerodynamic and low that I had to crouch to get in it. And driverless car after driverless car after driverless car.

The displays ranged in degrees of technological spectacle from the cool to the oh-my-word. One massive Ford truck, for instance, offered a souped‑up cruise control that would brake for pedestrians and take over stop-and‑go driving in heavy traffic. “No need to keep ramming the pedals yourself,” a representative said as I gripped the oversize steering wheel.

Across the floor sat a Volkswagen concept car that looked like a hippie caravan for aliens. The minibus had no door latches, just sensors. There was a plug instead of a gas tank. On fully autonomous driving mode, the dash swallowed the steering wheel. A variety of lasers, sensors, radar, and cameras would then pilot the vehicle, and the driver and front-seat passenger could swing their seats around to the back, turning the bus into a snug, space-age living room. “The car of the future!” proclaimed Klaus Bischoff, the company’s head of design.

It was a phrase that I heard again and again in Detroit. We are developing the cars of the future. The cars of the future are coming. The cars of the future are here. The auto market, I came to understand, is rapidly moving from automated to autonomous to driverless. Many cars already offer numerous features to assist with driving, including fancy cruise controls, backup warnings, lane-keeping technology, emergency braking, automatic parking, and so on. Add in enough of those options, along with some advanced sensors and thousands of lines of code, and you end up with an autonomous car that can pilot itself from origin to destination. Soon enough, cars, trucks, and taxis might be able to do so without a driver in the vehicle at all.

This technology has gone from zero to sixty--forgive me--in only a decade and a half. Back in 2002, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense and better known as DARPA, announced a “grand challenge,” an invitation for teams to build autonomous vehicles and race one another on a 142-mile desert course from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. The winner would take home a cool million. At the marquee event, none of the competitors made it through the course, or anywhere close. But the promise of prize money and the publicity around the event spurred a wave of investment and innovation. “That first competition created a community of innovators, engineers, students, programmers, off-road racers, backyard mechanics, inventors, and dreamers who came together to make history by trying to solve a tough technical problem,” said Lt. Col. Scott Wadle of DARPA. “The fresh thinking they brought was the spark that has triggered major advances in the development of autonomous robotic ground vehicle technology in the years since.”

As these systems become more reliable, safer, and cheaper, and as government regulations and the insurance markets come to accommodate them, mere mortals will get to experience them. At the auto show, I watched John Krafcik, the chief executive of Waymo, Google’s self-driving spin-off, show off a fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivan. “Our latest innovations have brought us closer to scaling our technology to potentially millions of people every day,” he said, describing how the cost of the three-dimensional light-detection radar that helps guide the car has fallen 90 percent from its original $75,000 price tag in just a few years. BMW and Ford, among others, have announced that their autonomous offerings will go to market soon. “The amount of technology in cars has been growing exponentially,” said Sandy Lobenstein, a Toyota executive, speaking in Detroit. “The vehicle as we know it is transforming into a means of getting around that futurists have dreamed about for a long time.” Taxis without a taxi driver, trucks without a truck driver, cars you can tell where to go and then take a nap in: they are coming to our roads, and threatening millions and millions of jobs as they do.

In Michigan that dreary January, the excitement about self-driving technology was palpable. The domestic auto industry nearly died during the Great Recession, and despite its strong rebound in the years following, Americans were still not buying as many cars as they did back in the 1990s and early aughts--in part because Americans were driving less, and in part because the young folks who tend to be the most avid new car consumers were still so cash-strapped. Analysts have thus excitedly described this new technological frontier as a “gold rush” for the industry. Autonomous cars are expected to considerably expand the global market, with automakers anticipating selling 12 million vehicles a year by 2035 for some $80 billion in revenue.

Yet to many, the driverless car boom does not seem like a stimulus, or the arrival of a long-awaited future. It seems like an extinction-level threat. Consider the fate of some workers on industrial sites already using driverless and autonomous vehicles, watching as robots start to replace their colleagues. “Trucks don’t get pensions, they don’t take vacations. It’s purely dollars and cents,” Ken Smith, the president of a local union chapter representing workers on the Canadian oil sands, said in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This “wave of layoffs due to technology will be crippling.”

Multiply that threat to hit not just truckers at extraction sites. Add in school bus drivers, municipal bus drivers, cross-country bus drivers, delivery drivers, limo drivers, cabdrivers, long-haul truckers, and port workers. Heck, even throw in any number of construction and retail workers who move goods around, as well as the kid who delivers your pizza. President Barack Obama’s White House estimated that self-driving vehicles could wipe out between 2.2 and 3.1 million jobs. And self-driving cars are not the only technology on the horizon with the potential to dramatically reduce the need for human work. Today’s Cassandras are warning that there is scarcely a job out there that is not at risk.

If you have recently heard of UBI, there is a good chance that it is because of these driverless cars and the intensifying concern about technological unemployment writ large. Elon Musk of Tesla, for instance, has argued that the large-scale automation of the transportation sector is imminent. “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12 [to] 15 percent of the workforce be unemployed,” he said at the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017. “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” he said of a UBI. “I think it’s going to be necessary.”

In Detroit, that risk felt ominously real. The question I wondered about as I wandered the halls of the Cobo Center and spoke with technology investors in Silicon Valley was not whether self-driving cars and other advanced technologies would start putting people out of work. It was when--and what would come next. The United States seems totally unprepared for a job-loss Armageddon. A UBI offers a way to ensure livelihoods, sustain the middle class, and guard against deprivation as extraordinary technological marvels transform our lives and change our world.

It goes as far back as the spear, the net, the plow. Man invents machine to make life easier; machine reduces the need for man’s toil. Man invents car; car puts buggy driver and farrier out of work. Man invents robot to help make car; robot puts man out of work. Man invents self-driving car; self-driving car puts truck driver out of work. The fancy economic term for this is “technological unemployment,” and it is a constant and a given.

You did not need to go far from the auto show to see how the miracle of invention goes hand in hand with the tragedy of job destruction. Just look at its host city. In the early half of the twentieth century, it took a small army--or, frankly, a decently sized army--to satiate people’s demand for cars. In the 1950s, the Big Three automakers--GM, Ford, and Chrysler--employed more than 400,000 people in Michigan alone. Today, it takes just a few battalions, with about 160,000 auto employees in the state, total. Of course, offshoring and globalization have had a major impact on auto employment in the United States. But advancing technology and the falling number of work hours it takes to produce a single vehicle has also been pivotal. With less work to go around and few other thriving industries in the area, Detroit’s population has fallen by more than half since the 1950s, decimating its tax base and leaving many of its Art Deco and postmodern buildings boarded up and empty.

More broadly, the decline of manufacturing in the United States has hit the whole of the Rust Belt hard, along with parts of the South and New England. There were 19.6 million manufacturing jobs in the country in 1979. There were roughly 12.5 million manufacturing jobs as of 2017, even though the population was larger by nearly 100 million people. As a result, no region of the United States fared worse economically in the postwar period than the manufacturing mecca of the Midwest, with its share of overall employment dropping from about 45 percent in the 1950s to 27 percent by 2000.

Even given these painful dislocations, economists see the job losses created by technological change as being a necessary part of a virtuous process. Some workers struggle. Some places fail. But the economy as a whole thrives. The jobs eliminated by machines tend to be lower-paying, more dangerous, and lower-value. The jobs created by machines tend to be higher-paying, less dangerous, and higher-value. The economy gets rid of bad jobs while creating better new ones. Workers do adjust, if not always easily.

In part, they adjust by moving. Millions of workers have left Detroit and the Rust Belt, for instance, heading to the sunny service economy of the Southwest or to the oil economy of the Gulf of Mexico. They also adjust by switching industries. On my way to Detroit, in a moment of Tom Friedman-esque folly, I asked the Lyft driver taking me to the Baltimore airport what he thought of the company’s plans to shift to driverless cars and the potential that he would soon be out of a job. “It’s worrisome,” he conceded. “But I’m thinking of trying to get some education to become someone to service them. You’re not going to just be able to take those cars into the shop, with the regular guys who are used to fixing the old models. You’re going to need a technician who knows about software.”

From a distance, the economy continues to grow and thrive, regardless of all of the pain and churn within. Despite the truly astonishing technological advances of the twentieth century, the share of Americans working rose. The labor market accommodated many of the men squeezed out of manufacturing, as well the influx of tens of millions of women and millions and millions of immigrants into the workforce. When manufacturing went from more than a quarter of American employment to just 10 percent, mass unemployment did not result. Nor did it when agriculture went from employing 40 percent of the workforce to employing just 2 percent.

The idea that machines are about to eliminate the need for human work has been around for a long time, and it has been proven wrong again and again--enough times to earn the nickname the “Luddite fallacy” or “lump-of-labor fallacy.” In the early nineteenth century, Nottingham textile workers destroyed their looms to demand better work and better wages. (No need.) During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes surmised that technological advances would put an end to long hours spent in the office, in the field, or at the plant by 2030. (Alas, no.) In 1964, a group of public-intellectual activists, among them three Nobel laureates, warned the White House that “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine” would foster “a separate nation of the poor, the unskilled, the jobless.” (Nope.) Three swings, three misses. As the economist Alex Tabarrok puts it, “If the Luddite fallacy were true we would all be out of work because productivity has been increasing for two centuries.”

Still, over and over again I heard the worry that this time it really is different. In his farewell address, President Obama augured, “The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.” Magazine covers, books, and cable news segments warn that the robots are coming not just for the truck drivers, but Wall Street traders, hospital diagnosticians, and warehouse workers.

In some tellings, the problem is that technology is not creating jobs in the way it once did and is destroying jobs far faster. This is the same old story about technological unemployment, on steroids: Advancing tech might lead to improvements in living standards and cheaper goods and services. But what is so great about having a self-driving car if you have no job, your neighbor has no job, and your town is slashing the school budget for the third time in four years? What if there is no need for humans, because the robots have gotten so good?

Detroit again offers a pretty good encapsulation of the argument. Cars are undergoing a profound technological shift, transforming from mechanical gadgets to superpowered computers with the potential to revolutionize every facet of transit. Billions of dollars are being spent to rush driverless vehicles into the hands of consumers and businesses. Yet the total employment gains from this revolutionary technology amount to perhaps a few tens of thousands of jobs. Robots are designing and building these new self-driving cars, not just driving them. That same dynamic is writ large around the country. Brick-and-mortar retailing giant Walmart has 1.5 million employees in the United States, while Web retailing giant Amazon had a third as many as of the third quarter of 2017. As famously noted by the futurist Jaron Lanier, at its peak, Kodak employed about 140,000 people; when Facebook acquired it, Instagram employed just 13.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Give People Money"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Annie Lowrey.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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